Sunken Buoy

After sitting on this one for several months, I’m finally ready to share a (longish) short story I’ve been working on. Should a content warning be desired, one can be found in this footnote.¹ Otherwise, dig in…

“Hey, Lia!” a loud voice cuts across the crowded bar. Lia turns to find her boyfriend, Mick, tipping back in his chair to wave at her through the open garage doors that lead to patio seating outside.

“Come on out,” he shouts. “The boys can’t wait to meet you.”

“I’m just grabbing a drink first,” Lia says, gesturing behind her to the bar. They stare at each other a moment longer, Mick’s face lit up with the soft, dopey smile that means he’s had a few beers already. Lia likes it when Mick is drunk like this — it’s the sort of drunk that means later, when they’ll walk back to his dorm room alone, he’ll slump over her shoulder and profess things into the night like, “I’m going to marry you,” or “You’re the only girl I’ll ever love.” Lia knows the first is probably true and knows better than to believe the second. Still, she takes it as a nice moment every time this happens because she’s mapped out her life with Mick with what she thinks is enough pragmatism to keep from making a fool of herself.

When Mick is like this, all Lia can think of is the plan. Within five years they’ll be married. Within ten they’ll have two kids and a big house an hour or so away from his parents. Within twenty-five he’ll have a midlife crisis and have an affair with some woman he’s met at work or the gym — see, the pragmatism — but within thirty he’ll trade the other woman in for a sports car or a beach house and the marriage will be saved. Within forty they’ll be retired, spending half their year somewhere warm like Florida, or Monaco, or Bermuda. And then there will be nothing to do but play golf and tennis, and call each other honey, and sip iced tea on the porch as they wait for their grandkids to call them. Lia can practically taste the future on her tongue on nights like this.

Mick blinks his eyes — probably trying to wink — then lets his chair fall forward again, slipping back out of view. Lia turns toward the bar, finding the bartender already waiting for her.

“What can I get you?” he asks, one hand absently wiping a towel across the bar top.

“Whatever you’ve got on tap,” Lia says to him. “Your choice.”

She knows Mick likes this about her; she’d heard him say as much to his friends once earlier in the year when they’d gone out to a fancy bar in the city, all his friends and all the girlfriends in one big group, and all the other girls had stood around deciding what cocktails to order for so long that the other patrons around them had got annoyed and there had been some shoving and some pointing fingers in faces.

“Thank God Lia’s not like that,” he’d said.

Lia’s cool, Lia’s an easy hang, Lia’s uncomplicated.

The bartender, towel thrown back over his shoulder, sets a beer in front of her, foam spilling up over the rim and streaking down the sides of the chilled glass.

“Am I putting that on his tab, too?” he asks, jutting his chin forward in the direction of where Mick waits.

Lia’s hand goes to her wallet on reflex before she stops herself.

Cool, easy, uncomplicated.

“Yeah, thanks,” she says, taking her beer before she can change her mind.

This year, Mick and Lia’s college is holding its graduation a week later than every other college within fifty miles, so the people packing the bar from wall to wall are almost entirely their peers, rather than a blend of students from the different institutions, like it has been every time they came throughout the year to celebrate Mick’s wins or Lia’s dream job offer or their thesis submissions. Lia lets herself take the long way out to the patio, exchanging pleasantries with every senior she recognizes from seminar, or the dining hall, or the library, or the laundry room, or the bleachers during Mick’s games. She tells herself that this detour is a way of savoring the end to these four years, but it isn’t. Lia is nervous; their later graduation date is also the reason Mick gave her, a month ago, for all his oldest friends from boarding school picking this weekend to hold an unofficial reunion.

Privately, Lia thinks this decision was less about scheduling and more that Mick inspires followers everywhere he goes, having been born with a higher quotient of charm than the average man. Give Mick ten minutes in a room and the crowd will be crowning him if there is ever one on hand, and there has been one surprisingly often, because it is that type of college. Mick, she suspects, has always had an archetypal grandness to him — he is the All-American, the Golden Boy, the Hometown Hero. His presence is weighty enough to induce orbit, change trajectories, cause collisions. Of course his friends would come to him; they would have no other choice.

Mick stands up when Lia gets close, transferring all her forward momentum into a spin and wrapping her up tight in his arms before kissing her on each cheek and then her mouth in turn, with loud exaggerated smacks. Beer drips down Lia’s arm, sticking in the crook of her elbow. She knows this is a coded show of affection, one more for the benefit of the men waiting at the table than her, meant to mimic the way Mick’s father always greets his wife. She also knows that Mick won’t let the moment end until—

“My god,” says someone at the table, “you’ve turned into Bill.”

Mick laughs and unwraps himself from around Lia’s body to introduce her at last.

“Boys, this is Lia — my Sue,” he says.

The boys, as if to prove some point, stand up like one many-headed, pomade-haired, silver-watch-wristed hydra to shake Lia’s hand while Mick gets another chair, insisting she take his. She then endures a slew of questions and accusatory statements such as, “How did you meet?” (three weeks into freshman year when Mick got a concussion during a game and Lia was assigned to be his note-taker for the introductory statistics class they were both taking), and “What are doing after graduation?” (finance, met with uproarious applause), and “You don’t sound like you’re from the south.” (southwest), but the most intriguing comment of the night is: “Mick must be crazy about you if he’s letting you meet us.”

This comes from Mick’s unofficial second brother and best friend since the days of diapers, Hayden.

“What do you mean?” she asks.

“All I’m saying is, Mickey Mouse over there has never brought a Minnie to the clubhouse before.”

Lia doesn’t know what to make of this. She and Hayden are standing together at the bar, getting refills for the whole group. There are a dozen questions she wants to ask, but all of them seem too lame, too difficult, too complicated — all the things she can’t be, especially not in front of this group — and it works her stomach in knots.

“Why...?” she asks, hoping Hayden will give some answer freely, and he does.

“Fifth birthday, Mickey Mouse theme. He dressed up with the little ears and everything.”

This is not the answer she expects and Lia bursts out laughing. The knot undoes itself — this is Hayden, this is another body which holds Mick’s love — she will be alright.

“I wish I had a picture so you could see. It was magical, really magical.” Hayden grins at the memory. “You know, Sue only let people call him Michael before that — she was very proper back then, with him being the first son and everything. By the time Chris was born we’d worn her down pretty good; I don’t think Christian lasted for even a day.”

“So, are you responsible for everyone calling him Mick?” Lia asks.

(Tomorrow, Orla, Lia’s younger sister by two years, will meet him for the first time and say it must be because Mick, unlike Mike, rhymes with dick.)

“That happens to be a topic of very hot debate,” Hayden says. “Mick and I always say it’s because of me but don’t ask Bill, because he remembers it differently. I mean, I’ll tell you right now that he once cheated at a game of Monopoly say… eight and half years ago? — so even if you do ask him, you should know that he isn’t very trustworthy.”

“If we’re using that as a basis for trust, is it fair to assume that you’ve never cheated at Monopoly?” Lia asks, joking back. She knows she isn’t drunk, not off one beer, but she feels sort of emotionally inebriated, and it’s making everything funnier than it should be.

“Oh, all the time,” Hayden admits easily. Lia laughs, and laughs. “The difference is, no one ever catches me.”

Mick arrives at the bar then, spreading himself between the two of them, his arms wide like wings around their shoulders. He’s well and truly drunk, Lia notices, to the level of when he goes out with his friends without her. This should not surprise her, but it does.

(In retrospect, here is where Lia will tell her therapist things began to sour. Right in this singular moment, when the man Mick will become slithered out of some stitch in the universe and latched itself onto the man he was, as he had been known by Lia until then. Her therapist will say, “That Mick did not arrive. He had nowhere to come from but inside. You can love him whole or you can’t love him at all, Lia.” And Lia will disagree, shaking her head in five or six mechanical swings before setting her appointment for the next week and leaving with all the same answers as when she came. Mick will be the one footing the bill.)

“And how are we?” Mick asks.

“Hi Mickey Mouse,” says Lia, leaning her head against his chest. “I think we’re good, right Hayden?”

Hayden says nothing, mouth too busy grinning. Mick drops his arm from around Hayden to grab one of the beers set out in front of them.

“If I may speak for the man,” he says, before taking a sip, “I think you’re doing wonderful.” Mick’s mouth must be as thirsty for the words as for the beer because he lets the ful of wonderful drag on and on as he turns away to go back to their table, meaning that Lia and Hayden go too, desperate to stay in the warmth of his sun.

Several drinks later, Lia really is drunk. And the more everyone else drinks, the less solid they seem, except Mick, who seems to get larger and larger in her eyes. At some point, Lia’s chair is appropriated by another table of latecomers and she’s left to press up against Mick, sitting on his lap. Every time she blinks she feels like she is half asleep, dreaming, like her body is something warm and pillowy and joined entirely with Mick’s, so that when he laughs it seems to her that she starts laughing at the precise same second even though really she’s always trailing him. She starts to hear their heart beats as one steady drumming, to imagine that their mouths are joined in sound, and all her thoughts that aren’t of Mick empty out of her head, drained like the accumulating glasses on the table.

But then Mick says her name, calls her back into being, and she shifts her woolly head against his chest to listen to the question someone (Hayden, she will remember later. It was Hayden’s voice) is posing to her: “How did you get those scars?”

It’s the sort of question that wouldn’t be answered if Lia were sober.

She says, “I was struck by lighting,” and lets her head slump back down on Mick’s chest.

Mick’s voice is the rumble of a mid-summer thunderstorm as he launches into the story of how Lia had been playing outside in the rain when the lightning struck her, and how she had probably actually died for a few seconds until her neighbor came out and found her laying in a puddle in the middle of the street. If Lia could hear the story over the rolling and crashing, she might have tried to correct Mick or gotten upset with him or stormed out of the bar and left him there for cheapening it, because the real story is this:

When Lia was seven, there was a drought. The monsoon rains which usually came late spring into early summer never arrived. The arroyos remained dry. Water from the ditches was restricted, then restricted again. The already high temperatures rocketed up an average ten degrees hotter. What little grass there was turned yellow and brittle, and the air would fill with dust if you tried to walk on anything that wasn’t asphalt or concrete. The river dried up, until it was only twenty feet of shallow water at its widest point. The clay-rich mud and silt which made its bed cracked and dried in large irregular shapes that could be lifted straight up and carried home, hard as if they were fired in a kiln. Rotting corpses of fish and frogs littered the shore. The crops in the south valley were the first to die, but in a month’s time the north valley had gone dry too. It wasn’t long before the livestock got sick and started to go. Swarms of black flies gathered on everything.

Once kids started passing out from dehydration and heatstroke, the schools were forced to shut down early for the summer. Lia’s parents — like all the parents in their neighborhood — still had to go to work, and Lia was left alone in the house to watch over Orla. Their grandmother used to watch the girls during the summer when school was out, but she’d died the year before and there was no one else around who could do it. Lia didn’t mind looking out for Orla very much; it bothered her more that they had to stay inside all day and not move or even think too much until their parents got home in the evening. This was because they only ran the swamp cooler for a couple of hours each day and Lia wasn’t allowed to run it when their parents weren’t there, and without it running, thinking felt like trying to listen underwater or walk through thick mud. It was better not to.

Lia’s father worked at a butcher shop belonging to one of the wealthier farmers which meant there was still plenty of meat to sell. It also meant that as other shops were forced to close, his became busier and busier. When he came home later and more tired each week, he brought the metallic tang of blood in with the smell of his own sweat. It was a familiar smell to Lia, the smell of life, balanced by the other scents that her mother brought home from her job. She had been a nurse when Lia was younger but layoffs at the hospital meant she was working as a house cleaner during that fateful summer. She still came home smelling like disinfectant, so to Lia it was not like much had changed at all from her childhood. A few times though, at the beginning of the drought, if Lia’s mother knew the owners would be away for the day she would take Lia and Orla with her on the bus across the city to one of the houses and let them sit in the air conditioning while she worked. This was different, and exciting. But then one of the owners came home and found the girls in the kitchen, flat on their backs, legs and arms spread like starfish to maximize contact with the cold ceramic tiles, and their mother had been fired. They had to stay at home all the time after that.

After three weeks, the monotony had eaten away at Lia enough that a schedule to give some structure to the endless dry days emerged organically. Early in the mornings, earlier even than her parents woke up, when the sun was a suggestion at the horizon and the moon was still visible overhead, Lia would climb out of the window in the bedroom she and Orla shared and take a walk around the block that they lived on. She went barefoot and quiet, inspecting every dark shadow for a hint of moisture. Even though each day she found nothing, climbing back into the window with a sinking heart, it was still her favorite part of the day because there was always the chance that something would be different. That a cloudy rainy scent would hit her nostrils and change the shape of her world.

Then there was breakfast, and helping Orla get dressed, and kissing her parents goodbye. By then the sun would be rising fast in the sky, bringing the heat with it. Lia would drag their mattresses down onto the floor — a feat for her skinny seven year old arms — and hang up the sheets between the posts on the bunk bed and the curtain rod to make a fort for her and Orla to lay in. If Orla started fussing they would have a snack or play pretend with their stuffed animals until she calmed down again. When it got close to dinner time, right before their parents would be home, Lia would put everything back the way it was.

After dinner, she and Orla would take turns getting to bathe first. Water usage was restricted, so Lia and Orla shared the same bathwater before her parents would drain the tub of the two inches of water and refill it again for their showers. Showering was a generous term — they used old yogurt containers or plastic pitchers from the dollar store to pour the water over their heads instead of turning on the real shower. Orla didn’t mind it because she was still too much of a kid to know about showering, but Lia knew enough to know it wasn’t the same. Sometimes she tried to skip out on it altogether but Orla would inadvertently tell on her or her parents would notice that her hair was still dry or that she still had a smudge of dirt on her nose and she would be sent in. Things got better after the showering though, because that was when the whole family would lay together in the girls’ room to read stories and be kissed goodnight.

Lia would count to one hundred once the lights were out, complete with M-I-S-S-I-S-S-I-P-P-Is, before wriggling out of her top sheet and out the window again. The pavement would still be hot at night against her bare feet and there was more risk of being seen by some night owl neighbor taking their trash out or sitting with their dog on the porch, so she mostly just paced the sidewalk in front of the house a few times, eyes desperate to find clouds capping the tin roof of some other house on the street and never finding any.

Her feet got ritual-tough and -hard over the weeks, thickening to pads that didn’t feel the heat or the loose pebbles as much as before the drought started. It made Lia feel like some kind of half-cat half-girl creature, out prowling in the mornings and the evenings. Only, she didn’t want to be a cat, she wanted to be a whale or a seal or a fish or even a fat sewer rat, so long as it was something that lived in the water. (She had never seen a sewer rat before, which was why they were included on the list. After the drought, after high school and after leaving, she will see one and experience for the first time in her life a mixture of equal parts fear and disgust so strong that she would sooner live through another drought than ever again wish to be such a vile creature.)

Everyone around Lia (which wasn’t many people, being Orla, her mother, her father, and the occasional neighbor) resigned themselves to the drought after a few weeks. They became dried out like the land, brittle, liable to break or blow away. Lia’s parents had never fought before — or at least not in tones loud enough for their daughters to hear — but the drought made everything fragile. And still, Lia clung to her schedule. She poked in the dark for dampness and watched for clouds. She dreamt of water bubbling up from the dirt floors and between the wooden boards until it filled their house and spilled out into the street. She imagined her skin like scales and wished for the taste of mud. In short, she had hope, and the hope of a little girl was a powerful thing, powerful enough to compel her out of bed before dawn in nothing but a too large t-shirt and baggy shorts to look up at the sky and find dark clouds one day where there had been only dark sky every day before. The hope inside Lia had swelled. She ran into the street. Eyes shut, hands straining up toward the sky, she channeled every potent ounce of unfulfilled-wishing from the past few months and wished for rain. And as she wished, the clouds heaved and the sky cleaved and down came the rain in big, cold, fat, wet drops against the flat bone of Lia’s forehead.

Then came the lightning.

Then came the crack and the pop and the heat.

Then came the ambulance.

Mick knows all of this but says next to none of it. (Later, Lia will tell herself that it was because he knew she didn’t want to tell the story herself. Later still, she will decide it was because they were all drunk and no one really knew what they were saying, Mick least of all. And even later she will say, Maybe it’s because all I really am is the scar, and my body is Mick’s, and her therapist will give her a chance to correct herself then, when met with sticky silence, say something about how Lia should have pursued a creative writing degree if she wanted to hide behind metaphor. The checks will go out in the mail with increasing regularity.)

It isn’t until another hour or two after the question about her scars that someone starts to flip the chairs up onto the tables and someone else comes to get Mick so he can close out his tab. Hayden goes with him. Lia finds it hard to stay standing on her own, bereft of her boyfriend’s sturdiness. She watches on, swaying a little, as the rest of Mick’s friends pull out their wallets. By the time the group is stumbling away from the patio, they have left behind a small fortune in fifty and hundred dollar bills.

Lia and Mick do not walk home alone together in the quiet dark where professions of love come so easily, but instead strung up between all of Mick’s friends until they pass the hotel and the men split away except for Hayden, who is supporting Mick’s other side. Even through her drunken stupor Lia is surprised when Hayden knows the way to Mick’s dormitory and when he knows which door is his. Mick’s key is issued from his pocket. His hand finds the switch on the wall to cast light on the room full of boxes and crumpled beer cans. Lia is reminded that she will never know Mick as Hayden knows Mick, that she will always be a girlfriend, a lover, or a wife, but never a friend. This thought sends a spike down her throat and deep into her stomach, piercing through all her soft tissue and porous membranes until it lodges itself in some deep, intractable spot where it will remain, semi-dormant, for the rest of Lia’s life.

Mick is very kind to his friends, even — or especially — when he is drunk. Therefore, Hayden ends up sleeping on the couch in Mick’s living room, covered in a blanket that Mick sends Lia to get from his closet. Mick, drunk as he is, falls asleep immediately. Lia waits ten minutes before extricating herself from his tangle of warm limbs to stumble-creep to the bathroom. Looking at her tired face in the mirror and wondering how she can make it appear less hungover before brunch the next morning with Mick’s parents, Lia realizes for the first time how little Mick must know of the maintenance required to be cool, easy, and uncomplicated.

The next day is graduation, endured through headaches and nausea, and the day after that they move out of their dormitories and also the state, and then two weeks pass and then two months and then two years and two more. Time hurries Lia and Mick along. It sets them up in their first apartment, pushes them through first paychecks and first promotions. Time also makes Lia heart-sore and -soft, so much so that she learns how to be homesick, how to miss the hot asphalt and blue skies of her childhood. Most of all, she misses the rain.

This endless ache sends Lia out during every muggy summer downpour in the city. Her feet have gone too soft from wearing shoes to stand on the hot asphalt itself, so she stands at the edge of the patchy grass out front of their brownstone apartment, close enough to feel the heat rippling off the street, and clasps her hands together over her chest as she wishes for rain even while knowing what the dark clouds overhead mean. And even though the rain comes like every indication suggests it would, it still feels magic for a moment. Unfortunately, the moment never lasts long enough. The rain is never cold enough, never hard enough, never loud enough to drown out the sirens and the horns and the press of the tall buildings, and Lia always tracks wet footprints inside feeling more disappointed than relieved because there is rain, of course, but it’s never the right kind of rain.

One day in August, after enduring weeks of weak, drizzly rain, Lia is desperate enough to call Orla. As Orla disapproves of her college degree, career, and most of all Mick, they tend to only speak on stilted family calls during the holidays and on Orla’s birthday, if she feels like picking up; Orla never calls for Lia’s birthday. Orla must not feel like picking up this time either, because Lia is sent to voicemail once, twice, three times before at last she gets an answer.

“Either someone’s dead or you finally got knocked up — which is it?” Orla asks.

Lia sighs, ignores Orla’s instigations, and swallows her pride to ask, “Is it raining?”

Orla — never quiet Orla — is silent for long enough that Lia thinks maybe she hung up on her, but then she hears the creak of the front door opening and Orla’s flip flops smacking against concrete and then a rush of air like she’s thrusting the phone out, and then: the rain. It’s so glorious it could make Lia cry, and it does.

“I still think you’re a goddamn yuppie,” Orla says after a bit, her voice muffled and tinny. Then she hangs up, and Lia does not call back again.

There are some things that summer that Lia convinces herself are good, despite the aching that only ever gets worse and never better. (It is these things that Lia will like to recite to her therapist. Considering no one would ever attack Mick, Lia will become quite good at defending him.) Things like, now that they live two hours from Mick’s parents rather than fifteen minutes, she learns that she loves watching Mick drive. On those late nights, him sated with love and adoration, it’s clear how well suited he is to being behind a wheel. Under the glow of the street lamps, Lia can imagine a road running around the entire world and Mick driving on and on, just as he is then, with his sport coat in a rumpled pile in the backseat, his shirt sleeves rolled up, and his tie loosened. Still, always, ever on his finger is his thick banded gold signet ring. When he lays his hand invitingly across the middle console for Lia to take, she imagines the weight of it on her own finger, imagines swallowing it, feeling it deep in her stomach like a rock, something to plug her up or weigh her down and keep her from floating off when she feels so happy sometimes it makes her feel sick.

“Thanks for indulging him,” Mick often says of his father once their hands are joined, because Bill will have peppered Lia with inappropriate questions about her home state and her upbringing, couched with statements like, “I’m just so damn curious,” or “She’s family, I’m allowed to ask her,” or “I don’t know how I had it so wrong before.”

“I don’t mind,” she’ll say, convincing herself it’s true as she does so. “He doesn’t mean anything by it.”

“Still,” Mick will say, “not everyone puts up with him as well as you do.”

And Lia will soften everything, and say, “It’s easy,” meaning I love you, and also Your dad is the man you will become so I must love him too.

Mick’s father is a bigot, albeit a polite one, but he is not a violent man, at least not toward his family. Bill is the sort of middle-aged man who you can tell had once been hard but, once surpassing age fifty and the first death of a close friend, softened all the way to the other end of the spectrum, likely to cry at even a hint of sentimentalism. His grey hair is thinning and his belly has taken on the same bulging shape of many professional athletes gone past their prime. He has more than enough charm to make you think he’s a silver fox when he’s really more of a walrus — he’s not Lia’s ideal man, but he also isn’t so horrible that she can’t imagine being married to a man exactly like him one day.

The trouble is, Mick isn’t his father. He is less of a bigot, or at least in less obvious ways. And granted, he never hits her, but he does smash glasses, and throw picture frames, and rip apart dresses, and all the while Lia can feel his thoughts on her even if his hands aren’t. But Mick has a pull like a lodestone, and she remains stuck in his orbit even on the days the trash bags go out to the curb full of detritus. This understanding between them is the reason why, Lia comes to believe, he won’t hit her. That, and she thinks wife-beating is probably something too gauche in Mick’s eyes for him to ever do it. And because Lia will not let herself be a fool, she learns to blend love with hurt and how to place affection like a band aid over her fear. This works well enough for the long year that Lia misses the rain, well enough that all of her and Mick’s friends (she has begun to think of them that way, as her friends too) treat their relationship like the last bastion of true love, and well enough that Lia more or less starts to believe it herself.

The next summer, the weekend before their fifth college reunion, Mick takes Lia out to dinner at her favorite restaurant. When the waiter brings out their plates of dessert, Lia’s has a small black jewelry box on it instead of a slice of chocolate cake, and Mick drops down to one knee. Lia says yes, of course; they were running behind on the timeline she’d set years ago and she feels an overwhelming relief at the proposal, almost enough to forget all the ugly words Mick had said to her the night before, but not quite.

“I love you so much,” Mick says as he slides the gorgeous, heavy ring onto her finger.

Lia kisses him, but does not say the words back.

Their wedding is six months later, and not much later than that, Lia realizes she’s pregnant. They weren’t trying for a baby, but Lia is notoriously bad at remembering to take her birth control. She takes the realization with a nasty shock. Sure, it was the plan — two kids in ten years, and a couple years gap between them would be nice — but as she looks at the blue lines on the plastic test, Lia struggles to remember why she’d ever made the plan to begin with.

Mick finds her there, still in the bathroom hours later, and he looks so happy, so thrilled, that Lia shoves away all those freezing-thoughts and smiles.

When Lia’s therapist asks her how she feels about the pregnancy, Lia says, “This is what happy couples do, isn’t it? Start families.” Her therapist writes down a lot of notes but doesn’t ask if that means Lia is happy.

Several weeks later, when Lia and Sue are alone in the kitchen washing the plates from dinner and Mick and Bill have gone up to the study to smoke cigars — Lia suspects — or drink some of the good scotch that Bill keeps hidden, Sue says out of the blue, “It’ll be a boy. It’s always a boy.”

“Do you really think so?” Lia asks.

“It’s always a boy,” Sue repeats, firmer this time.

It’s quiet after that, quiet enough to hear the occasional burst of laughter from up the stairs as the men celebrate fatherhood. Lia hadn’t wanted to tell them yet — she hadn’t even wanted to tell Mick — but he’d insisted. It wouldn’t have mattered in the end, because the instant Sue opened the door to let them in for their regular monthly dinner, she’d gotten a pitying look in her eye and a knowing slant to her mouth that Lia didn’t much care for. It was a look that meant she knew Lia was pregnant, and she knew it was going to be a boy, and she knew Lia didn’t want her to know. Sue had always been harder for Lia to read, largely because she saw so little of her in Mick, but as they stand side by side, drying the dishes, Lia realizes that she already knows one crucial aspect of her mother-in-law, which is that she, like Lia, is an outsider.

“Did you ever…?” Lia falters. She wants to ask, Did you ever wish for something different? But the words are too treasonous for her to voice, not when she is still trying after all these years to be cool, easy, and uncomplicated, and certainly not when standing side by side with Mick’s mother, in his childhood home, drying the set of crystal dishes that have been handled by generations of outsider-women before her.

Sue puts down her towel. Maybe because she is an outsider too, she seems to understand what Lia wanted to ask. Her sigh is long and weary.

“Maybe once,” she says, “but that was so long ago I can hardly remember.” Sue glances at Lia’s belly and frowns. “It’s better not to, dear. It’s better not to.”

These words stay with Lia throughout her pregnancy. She answers questions with a dull factuality at doctor’s appointments, takes her vitamins without water, attends lamaze classes without relish, even asks for permission to work remote so that the month before her due date she can move into the guest bedroom at Bill and Sue’s without complaint. She also keeps a scrap of paper with the number for an abortion clinic written on it in her wallet, although she never calls it, or at least never for long enough for anyone on the other end to answer.

Every morning during this last month that she can, Lia walks down to visit with the river near Bill and Sue’s house. If there’s no one around, no one walking their dog or riding a bike, she slips out of her sandals and eases her feet into the water. It isn’t exactly dangerous, but for a heavily pregnant woman a lot of things are unadvised, up to and including climbing down slippery river banks to stand in murky waters covering up rather a lot of sharp rocks. Even in this last stretch, Lia has a hard time thinking of herself as a pregnant woman; she understands it enough, though, that she only does this in secret.

During the second week of her stay, Lia cuts her foot on one of the rocks. Bill notices her limping and asks about it. Without a second thought, she says something about swollen feet and he lets it go, but Sue gives another of those knowing looks that make Lia feel scraped out. The cut on her foot goes purplish, so when she’s at the doctor for what will be her last pre-birth check-up he prescribes her some antibiotics and scolds her enough that she is at least wearing proper shoes the next time she’s able to sneak off to be near the river.

Autumn is a wet season where Bill and Sue live, which means the river waters are high up on the banks, running dark and fast past Lia where she stands, watching, and holding her own swollen belly. She is imagining how nice it would feel to slip into the waters and float away down the river like any other piece of debris caught up in the current when she feels a popping sensation and a sudden wetness and she realizes that maybe that pain in her lower back over the past couple hours was a sign of early contractions after all. With all this information swimming in her head, Lia hardly notices that it starts to rain. And as blood-tinged fluid leaks out from between her legs and trickles down the bank to mix with the dark, quick waters, she swears she can hear the river calling her name.

Sue drives her to the hospital. Bill won’t come until later — two hours later — when Mick arrives from the city. He comes straight from work, still in his suit until he’s given scrubs to wear so that he can come into the room. Lia wishes he would wait outside with Bill — who’d said, “Women’s work,” and winked from the doorway — but he is there, so she squeezes Mick’s hand as she pushes, hard enough that his signet ring leaves an indent in her palm, so deep that she could read the inscription back, if she wanted to.

There is a single calm moment as the baby is lifted up by the doctor and everyone lets out a collective exhale. If Lia knew what was coming next, she would have yanked her hand free of Mick’s grip, free of the weight of that ring, and she would have run. But there’s no time — she has just enough to wipe the wet strands of hair away from her face before the doctor hands over a small wrapped bundle to her, and says, with a smile, “It’s a girl.”

The room erupts.

Off to her left, beyond where Lia can see, now chained to the baby instead of Mick, she hears Sue say, “Well, we can’t name her Will anymore, can we?”

Mick says nothing back, and Lia doesn’t need to look to know this is because he’s gone already, gone to the hallway to confer with the only other person who matters to him in this moment. Only fragments of the conversation penetrate Lia’s post-birthing haze (haze, because she took the epidural, but also because it hurt and is still hurting), but it’s enough that she is unsurprised when Bill, in the loud voice old people who can’t hear so great use because they’ve forgotten about young people who can hear, asks Mick, “Are you sure it’s yours?”

Lia doesn’t even try to listen for Mick’s response because the baby starts to cry right then, loud and wailing and utterly miserable. This will become a familiar sound over the coming weeks.

“You have postpartum depression, Lia,” her therapist says over the phone. “It’s not uncommon. There’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

Lia can’t tell her therapist that she isn’t ashamed and that she isn’t suffering from postpartum depression, just regular depression. She thinks, for the amount she is paying her therapist (the amount Mick is paying her therapist) this should be obvious. Really, she thinks, the baby isn’t even a factor in her unhappiness. It’s a bystander, and a reluctant one at that. After all, they are having all kinds of latching problems, and possible milk sensitivities, and it exhibits a general fussiness that increases and decreases in direct correlation to its proximity to Lia.

Still, this isn’t insurmountable for the first week after her hospital discharge, with Sue there to help, to soften the roughness of shock with a dredged up well of love Lia had not previously thought possible. Sue loves her granddaughter, Lia knows, but love is not enough to stop them from making the drive back to their apartment in the city without her. They go alone; the three of them in the car, yet all alone.

Mick doesn’t even help unpack the car, just opens the front door — leaving it wide open, the keys in the knob — and goes straight to his office, locking himself in with a bottle of whiskey. The baby, thankfully, fell asleep in the car, so Lia leaves it strapped into the car seat, and she leaves that on the floor just inside the front door as she goes back and forth, bringing in the suitcases and the cooler bags full of prepared meals. Then there’s nothing to do but wait — wait for the baby to wake up, wait for Mick to come out, wait for her plan to start feeling like her life.

Unsurprisingly, the baby wakes up first. It starts to cry, like it always seems to when it finds itself with no one but Lia for company, and doesn’t stop no matter what she tries. She tries to nurse. The baby wails and flails. She tries to walk the baby, rocking it in her arms. Nothing changes. Maybe because of all the noise, or just her exhaustion, Lia doesn’t notice all the sounds coming from Mick’s office. Sounds like things being slammed, and swept off desks. When the door is finally thrown open, she is surprised by how loud it is.

“Who is he?” Mick asks, nothing more than a dark voice coming from a dark silhouette in the doorway.

Lia doesn’t say anything, not realizing yet what he means. The baby keeps crying.

“WHO IS HE?” Mick yells. He steps out of the doorway, now very much a man, drink still in one hand while the other jabs through the air toward Lia and the baby.

“There’s no one,” she says, the realization sharp and bitter. “There’s no one else, Mick.”

Mick doesn’t believe her. He keeps coming closer, ugly words cutting the distance between them in halves until there’s no hallway left. And then Mick takes both hands — the tumbler drops, shattering, glass goes everywhere — and he pushes.

The baby starts to cry, one block away from the apartment. It starts to rain on the next block. Big, wet, heavy drops, the kind that Lia remembers from her childhood, the kind that she made herself sick with wanting over. The other people walking put up umbrellas, flick up hoods, duck under awnings, or dart into cafés, restaurants, grocery stores, comic book shops, hotel lobbies — anything with a welcoming, open door. Soon, Lia and the baby are the only ones left exposed. No one looks at them, or at least no one looks twice. She keeps walking, not really thinking about anything except for the sound of the wall as it met with her head and the feeling of her blood now pounding there.

Lia doesn’t stop until she’s standing in the middle of a long bridge. She looks up. Dark clouds. She looks down. Dark waters. The rain gets heavier, and the sound of it splattering over everything mixes with the sound of the rushing river below until it becomes a roaring command. Lia hears it, so loud it might split her open, send her skin unraveling in sheets following the lines of her old scars. She steps up over the railing. It’s hard, balancing the baby in her arms, and with everything slick and wet, but the waters are calling and the baby isn’t crying anymore.

“Come on, Susie, darling,” says Lia.

This is the first time she has said her daughter’s name.

“Come on, let’s go home.”

1 Alcohol abuse, domestic abuse, and suicidal ideation are implicit in this text.